David Torres Sanchez (Senior Research Associate working on OR-MASTER and CENTRAL Member) and Matthew Bold (STOR-i PhD Student) were recently placed 5th in the finals of the ROADEF/EURO 2020 Challenge. The results were announced on the 14th of July at the closing ceremony of the EURO 2021 Conference.

This challenge occurs every two years (typically) and is organised jointly by the French Operational Research and Decision Support Society (ROADEF) and the European Operational Research Society (EURO).

The industrial sponsor of the ROADEF/EURO Challenge 2020 was RTE (the electricity transmission system operator of France), who provided problem description, data, and a prize pot of 55,000 €.

The problem was a stochastic scheduling problem with resource constraints, which is applied to schedule maintenance interventions on power lines across the grid accounting for the risk associated with these.

Other participants included teams formed by members of academia and industry from all over the world.

Our team used a math-based heuristic for the problem and climbed ranks over the 2 different elimination stages (qualification and semi-finals).

More information about the challenge and the results can be found on the following link: ROADEF/EURO 2020 challenge final results